Organization Addiction

Learning to practice the art of disarray

I have become addicted to apps.

I imagine this is a problem most people don’t face. Except I think maybe some do. Let me explain.

If I could give myself a job title, it would be Information Engineer. Or something like that. I used to want Systems Engineer but that means something totally different in the technology industry. The bottom line is, I love organizing things. I love analyzing and creating systems of organization.

Here are the boxes and spaces and this goes here and that goes there.

And suddenly I’m having a fabulous day.

Living in a digital world, I’ve long wanted, then, to build apps.

Here is my digital organization. I build the structure and you fill it in.

For nearly a decade I’ve wanted this. And then last year I finally began to learn SwiftData (Apple’s coding language). And I started building apps.

• I built a daily organizer for day to day managing of life.

• I built a travel planner to hold all the details of a trip together.

• I built a project planner for when you need lists and sections and boxes within boxes to manage tasks (because I needed it to keep up with the apps I want to build and stories I want to write and to keep those things nicely segmented and organized).

And now, I don’t merely thrive on those apps, I need them.

• I want to bring order to my social media presence, but I haven’t built an app for that yet.

• I need to organize my parents “estate” (which sounds fancier than I mean it to) but I haven’t built that app yet (it’s next on the list).

That’s the part I think other people can relate to. Some of us know what we need to do, but we need to be organized as we go about it. And so we get stuck because we don’t know how to plow forward and just get things done without that foundation of organization.

I imagine this manifests as:

• I need to shop for seasonal clothes. But First I need to organize my closet.

• I need to buy groceries. But First I need to lay out my meal plan for the week (that’s in my daily app).
  OR first I need to organize all of my recipes (I don’t have an app for that - I use Airtable).

• I need to do my taxes. But First I need to organize all of my financial information (this one is kind of legit).

The bottom line, I think, is sometimes we need to let things be messy. Buy the wrong groceries. Forget something so you “have to” order a pizza.

Go shopping and buy nothing or something because it’s pretty rather than because it’s on the list.

But don’t let your taxes get messy. The government doesn’t like that. Get organized early.

In some ways, this post is that messiness. It’s off brand, off topic, probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it feels good to say out loud.

What do you think? Are you the type of person who needs organization? Where do you get stuck and where do you want to practice the art of disarray?